Alexis Soloski has an entertaining piece in the NY Times (archived) about how to pronounce the name of the titular (though absent) character of one of the most famous of plays; of course, the idea that there is one “correct” way to say it is silly, but it’s fun to see how various actors have dealt with it. It starts:
Godot is a big name in theater. How do you say that name? Depends.
The actor Brandon J. Dirden articulates a variation on the word Godot at least a dozen times a night in the current Broadway revival of Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot.” As he speaks, vowels and consonants dance around in his mouth, emerging as Godet, Goday, Godan, Godin, Gahdeh.
Dirden plays Pozzo, an aristocratic man who chances on two tramps, Didi and Gogo, played by Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves. When told that they are waiting for a man named Godot, Dirden cheerfully massacres the name, accenting a French pronunciation (Beckett wrote the original in French) with a viscous Southern twang.
“As if this play wasn’t confusing enough,” he said in a recent phone interview.
Here’s a particularly annoying quote:
In 2009, Anthony Page, the British director of a Broadway revival starring John Goodman and Nathan Lane, told The New York Times: “GOD-dough is what Samuel Beckett said. Also, the word has to echo Pozzo. That’s the right pronunciation. Go-DOUGH is an Americanism, which isn’t what the play intended.”
I fart in his general direction; his mother was a hamster and his father smelt of elderberries.
I remember uttering a complete utter mispronunciation* of the name, as a teenager, in front of my English teacher during a conversation about what I was reading in my spare time; she corrected me but my current pronunciation (which is similar to Page’s claimed pronunciation**) overrides my memory of what pronunciation my teacher used. I think this teacher is one of exactly two people with whom I have discussed the play aloud, as opposed to discussing it on the internet***.
*I was sufficiently young and naive to pronounce the t, which I think is not exactly a common thing to do among people discussing this play.
**I make no claim to be right… I just so happen to pronounce it this way.
***Watching people perform the play is a different beast.
That would best fit what he supposedly intended the meaning to be: “God 0”.
There’s a lot of “supposedly” when it comes to Beckett (and especially Godot).
GOD-dough is what Samuel Beckett said … That’s the right pronunciation. Go-DOUGH is an Americanism, which isn’t what the play intended.”
Well, given that the play was originally written in French …
Mention of this play always reminds me of the condensed version:
Act 1.
Scene 1.
Evening.
A country road. A tree.
Estragon, sitting on a low mound, is trying to take off his boot. He pulls at it with
both hands, panting.
He gives up, exhausted, rests, tries again.
As before.
Enter Vladimir.
Enter Godot.
FINIS.
One aspect of the play is the profusion of different names for the various characters. So, e.g., Didi and Gogo are also Vladimir and Estragon. And so forth. It’s not at all surprising to learn that Beckett would be inclined add his own opinions to the confusion, since confusion appears to be a good part of the point of the exercise.
Mr. Page no doubt mispronunciated the h in his first name, thus solidifying his credentials as un HIjo de parentesco variado, with poison ivy leaf clusters.
Very guttural tongue, the “viscous Southern twang.” Viscous?
“The Possibilities, Pitfalls, and Potential of References to Waiting for Godot in Judicial Opinions”
he supposedly intended the meaning to be: “God 0”.
No — and why the play was originally written in French. [h/t ‘Richard’s Bicycle Book’ 1979]
My partner, who’s a theatre scholar and a huge Beckett fan, also says it’s supposed to be “GOD-oh.”
“But something about Godot’s singular focus on waiting makes it particularly suited for citation in a variety of legal contexts.”
“God 0”
This has always struck me as much too lame-o to be remotely plausible as an “explanation” of the name. (Squaresville, Daddy-o!)
God 0 was the original conception of the character. We’re at least up to God 4.1.3 by now.
Southern twang
This guy currently lives in Alabama, so …
We’re at least up to God 4.1.3 by now
God ℵ₀ perhaps (thus accounting for the wait)?
We can ask Godot how he pronounces his name. We just have to wait until he shows up.
“isn’t what the play intended”
The play can’t intend anything. It isn’t a conscious being. As for what Beckett intended, it’s interesting to speculate, but largely unknowable. Chances are, Beckett himself didn’t really know (writers seldom do; they may think they do, but that’s post-hoc rationalization that comes after the moment of creation), or it changed from moment to moment.
Meaning in a play is created at the intersection of the playwright’s words, the actors’ and director’s performances, and the audience’s reception, or in the case of the pronunciation of a name, what the audience expects to hear.
WAIT-ing FOR go-DOT preserves the trochaic meter in the title.
Meaning in a play is created at the intersection of the playwright’s words, the actors’ and director’s performances, and the audience’s reception, or in the case of the pronunciation of a name, what the audience expects to hear.
Well put. I don’t know why so many people are so attached to the idea of a single immutable “meaning” for everything (words, dreams, art, you name it). It’s a messy world — that’s what makes it enjoyable!
Re Vanya’s proposal, I’m not sure that one would put much stress on “for” in ordinary speech unless self-consciously sounding like one was reciting poetry. WAIT-ing for guh-DOUGH has a perfectly fine rhythm* to my ear, whether or not it is authorially approved.
*I don’t have a strong view on whether to parse this as trochee-plus-anapest or dactyl-plus-iamb.
Ah. Roger Godeau it is, then.
(…though that’s not actually mutually exclusive with… almost anything else.)
Although the stress would be more equal in French, first syllable stress in English at least keeps two distinct vowels, which feels better to me than letting the first vowel turn into a schwa.
But presumably it’s just the same idea as people in the US going to the baLAY.
the idea that there is one “correct” way to say it is silly
Didn’t we just decide that people know what their own names are? I can’t see why authors wouldn’t know what their characters’ names are…
Didn’t we just decide that people know what their own names are? I can’t see why authors wouldn’t know what their characters’ names are…
Those are two very different situations. Do parents automatically know how their kids’ names should be pronounced? They think they do, but what if the kids decide differently? I was once close to a woman named Andrea, whose parents called her AN-dree-a but who wanted to be called an-DRAY-a. (I, of course, used the latter.) A book may be your child, but once you send it out into the world it has its own destiny.
ℵ₀
Okay, since we’re arguing pronunciations, who says aleph-nought and who says aleph-zero? Is there any sense to the split?
Team aleph-zero here; “nought” is not part of my idiolect.
Aleph-null is the One True Pronunciation.
Aleph-null is what my teachers said and I have not seen fit to differ.
We’re at least up to God 4.1.3 by now
God 2.0 — Personal God
God 3.0.1 — Professional God
God 4.1.3 — Enterprise God
Ah, but we must proceed via Anselm’s Induction.
(Though this will not, of course, enable us to discover a Real God, only an Integral God.)
Aleph-null is the One True Pronunciation.
Ah yes, of course you’re right; it’s been a long time since I dealt with such things.
Yep, “aleph-null”. That’s probably my only use of “null”, and my only use of “nought” is for 0 subscripts, mostly in physics.
I decided to see what wikipedia recommended for pronunciation and was told “(ynganiad: aleph-naught neu aleph-sero; mewn Almaeneg, ac weithiau yn Saesneg, sydd hefyd yn defnyddio’r term aleph-null).”
Viscous?
Maybe the author looked up “thick” in a thesaurus.
“Okay, since we’re arguing pronunciations, who says aleph-nought and who says aleph-zero? Is there any sense to the split?”
It’s alef-null to the cognoscenti. Not sure what the ‘ph’ is for – it’s not Greek.
And of course Godot is stressed on the first syllable, because that’s what Irish and British people do with naturalised French words, while Americans (as Prof. Geoff Lindsay has explained on YouTube) put a heavy stress on the last syllable of almost all words deemed foreign, and use tense vowels.
I’m not sure what the “it” is supposed to be in “it’s not Greek.” I expect that the conventional spelling “aleph” of our English word for the Hebrew glyph in question does indeed come from the Greek spelling άλεφ for the same referent, mediated through Latin. Using “alif” for the corresponding glyph in the Arabic script makes perfect sense because Anglophone scholarship did not really inherit as much of a parallel established Latin/Greek tradition of discussion of the script and its letters.
One interesting-to-me quirk of the Latin handling of the letter names is that Jerome, as translator, decided to signal to his readers the acrostic structure of the Hebrew original of the Lamentationes by putting the name of the relevant Hebrew letter for each verse into his text, so e.g. the first verse of the first chapter begins “ALEPH. Quomodo sedet sola citivas plena populo” etc. I doubt Jerome intended for these to be read aloud, but in the course of time they became treated as part of the Latin text at least when it was chanted or sung, and Thomas Tallis, in particular, went kind of crazy with them. This wiki article has an illustration of the sheet music showing the monosyllable “BETH” stretched out over seven bars of mindblowing polyphonic/melismatic harmony. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamentations_of_Jeremiah_the_Prophet_(Tallis)
And of course Godot is stressed on the first syllable, because that’s what Irish and British people do with naturalised French words, while Americans (as Prof. Geoff Lindsay has explained on YouTube) put a heavy stress on the last syllable of almost all words deemed foreign, and use tense vowels.
In other words, Godot is stressed on the first syllable by people who stress it on the first syllable. By people who don’t, it is not.
Both Hebrew and Greek shifted their [pʰ tʰ kʰ] to [f θ x] after the convention of transcribing Greek into Latin with ph th ch was firmly established.
The Romans never made an attempt to transliterate Greek. By their time, ει ου had become [iː uː], and they’re transcribed as i u every time.
Fortunately, both Latin and English follow the orthographic convention of pronouncing the digraph “ph” as /f/, so as to keep up with the foreigners.
Americans (as Prof. Geoff Lindsay has explained on YouTube) put a heavy stress on the last syllable of almost all words deemed foreign, and use tense vowels.
More precisely, we put a stress on the last syllable of almost all words deemed French. I don’t think the stress on the last syllable of our “ballet” and “valet” is any heavier than that on “today”. In a great many words from other foreign languages—aria, über, enchilada, samovar, manga, et cetera—we don’t stress the last syllable.
No doubt we use more tense vowels in foreign words than British people do, especially if our typically merged LOT-PALM vowel is considered tense, but there are others, such as “ravioli”, especially before double letters, as in “broccoli” and “vignette”.
Both Hebrew and Greek shifted their [pʰ tʰ kʰ] to [f θ x] after the convention of transcribing Greek into Latin with ph th ch was firmly established
This is not quite right for Hebrew. LXX uses φ θ χ for כ ת פ regardless of whether they later became fricatives or not, and uses τ κ for ק ט.
The AmEng pronunciation of “ravioli” with /æ/ (also “macaroni”) is interesting because RP uses it in the first syllable of “pasta” but we instead use the merged LOT-PALM vowel which at least in that context seems more Italianate. Which doesn’t seem tenser to me than a British æ-as-in-pæsta *sounds*, but what do I know. Of course there may be dialect variation in how much muscle tension is typically involved in the utterance of /æ/ and in any event we have more vowels than a simple set of tense/lax (or long/short) pairs can really account for.
I once read an article arguing that the whole lax/tense-business in phonology is more or less useless and should be abandoned.
And in General British pronunciation, the ASH-vowel has been lowered to a position close to C[a], which some handbooks and dictionaries have introduced into their phonetic transcription. I think this was first noticed in 1970 or so, when some people started complaining about the “northern” pronounciation of a.
the whole lax/tense-business
It’s acoustically very like the ATR thing, which is very familiar in West Africa, but apparently the mechanism in Germanic languages is quite different:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_and_retracted_tongue_root
Wikipedia says, “The traditional definition, that tense vowels are produced with more ‘muscular tension’ than lax vowels, has not been confirmed by phonetic experiments. Another hypothesis is that lax vowels are more centralized than tense vowels. There are also linguists[4] who believe that there is no phonetic correlation to the tense–lax opposition.” However, the article’s lead contradicts that.
[4] Lass, Roger (1976). English Phonology and Phonological Theory. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-21039-9.
Various Western Oti-Volta languages have vowel height harmony, which is a different thing from ATR harmony (in fact, a language can have both types at once, working differently from each other):
https://www.academia.edu/108465600/Goad_2022_Height_Harmony
It turns up a lot in Bantu.
It’s present but fairly limited in Kusaal, and absent in the Mampruli-Dagbani subgroup, where the whole thing is moot because the vowel system has been radically simplified. But it’s quite a prominent feature in Mooré, Farefare and Dagaare. I think that must be an innovation, but there isn’t a lot of evidence otherwise to make those languages into their own genetic branch. Perhaps it’s to do with interaction with Grusi languages, or even Grusi substrates. (There’s no sign of it in Nõotre, which is not in contact with any Grusi languages and probably never has been.)
The Grusi language Kassem has a full opposition of five “lax” to five “tense” vowels, in Niggli’s description. Looks like an ATR harmony system, though he doesn’t call it that.
[Oops: yes he does. He says the “tense” set are pronounced “avec la racine de la langue avancée.”]
Yes, I glossed over all exceptions to the fricativization process.
/t k/ remain somewhat aspirated in Arabic.
The Nobel prizewinner Jacques Monod (one of the very few Nobel prizewinners who remain household names in their fields decades after the award) has even stress on the two syllables in French, but is spoken with heavy stress on the first syllable by British biochemists (monno), and heavy stress on the second syllable by American biochemists, to the extent that the first syllable is barely even a schwa (m’no). The two names are similar enough that I would expect the same variation with Godot.
When Nicolas Sarkozy was President of France no one thought of Sarközy as a Hungarian name, though it is, of course, with no thought of stressing the first syllable. When he made an official visit to Hungary the television news had a lot of fun reproducing the Hungarian reports: they obviously found the Hungarian pronunciation weird and amusing, both the stress pattern and the initial S as /ʃ/.
Vous voulez dire Sárközy.
How many syllables is that in Hungarian?
@Athel: Jacques Monod (one of the very few Nobel prizewinners who remain household names in their fields decades after the award)
After looking at the list, I’d say the majority of the physics winners from twenty or more years before I was in grad school (in the ’80s) were still household names in physics, and I feel sure that quite a few of them still are.
How many syllables is that in Hungarian?
Three: SHAHR-kö-zee. (Presumably derived from the region Sárköz.)
Thanks. I’m told “György” is one syllable, and I didn’t know what the y did to the z,
Yeah, that can be confusing. Sometimes it’s an extra syllable, sometimes just a consonant modifier.
Well, I thought it was á, but the Hungarian version of the Wikipedia article on the great man has Nicolas Paul Stéphane Sarközy de Nagy-Bocsa as his full name, so I put Sarközy. However, I should have looked more closely, as it does have Sárközy further down, in reference to his father, written Sárközy Pál.
They’re sneaky, those Hungarians!
In consulting wikipedia’s list of other notable bearers of the surname, I learned about an Austrian showbiz personality born Anton Hans Sarközi who is better known (in, among other contexts, the Eurovision Song Contest) by his stage name Tony Wegas. My best guess is that the stage-surname is the “Vegas” of Las Vegas respelled according to German orthography, just like Sliwa-for-Sliva that we were recently discussing in another thread. In any event, he is apparently not averse to multilingual wordplay, having been showcased in productions such as “Veni Vidi Wegas” and “I Did It My Wegas.”
Veni Vidi Wegas
Properly pronounced Weni Widi Vegas.
In Hungarian orthography, y occurs only in gy ty ny ly*, but surnames are exempt, and many continue the 17th-century fad of replacing final i with y. Ornamental th also occurs, among a few wilder phenomena.
* [ɟ], [c], [ɲ], and in a few conservative accents [ʎ], otherwise [j].
Ah, thanks.
GT on WP.hu gives me
So they know and they don’t care. And the stress is initial in the ancestral form.
With names of obvious Norwegian origin, we do that too. Case in point: Pete /²heg.set/. Not so obvious, or obviously no longer Norwegian, from the same domain: Karl Rove and Walter Mondale.
It’s probably different in physics (I can’t suggest why), but prompted by Jerry’s comment I checked for the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Since 1965 (the year of Monod’s prize) 138 people have been awarded it. Of these, there are 18 (H. Gobind Khorana, Marshall W. Nirenberg, Max Delbrück, Salvador E. Luria, Bernard Katz, Rodney R. Porter, Karl von Frisch, Konrad Lorenz, Nikolaas Tinbergen, Christian de Duve, David Baltimore, Barbara McClintock, César Milstein, Edmond H. Fischer, Edwin G. Krebs, Sydney Brenner, Jack W. Szostak, Svante Pääbo), or 13%, that I know something about independently. That’s more than I would have guessed, but it’s pretty few, anyway.
one of the very few Nobel prizewinners who remain household names in their fields decades after the award
That horrible fellow Francis Crick, just now deceased, was one of the select few, of course.
Among the medical ones, Allvar Gullstrand is well-known to ophthalmologists, though probably to nobody else. Otherwise mainly notable for preventing a Nobel prize being given to Albert Einstein, but I expect he was kind to children and small animals.
Most of the prizewinners for Literature are at least recognisable by name. Some of them, I’ve even actually read …
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_in_Literature
You’re thinking of that horrible fellow James Watson; Crick died in 2004 (and wasn’t quite as horrible).
I am indeed. Apologies to the memory of Francis Crick.
Einstein got one anyway – for quantum physics (the photoelectric effect, i.e. photovoltaics). Mwa ha ha ha haaaaah.
Watson obituary.
I had a genetics professor once who liked to call the two DNA strands “Watson” and “Crick”.
Watson’s biography is a nostalgic window into those innocent times when aging celebrities who started showing signs of wacko would be ushered off the public stage.
From the sound of it, he was like that all along. He just got more vocal about it as he became famous.
Though he seems also to have been an example of a phenomenon we’ve often noted here: a very successful man* in one field, who concludes from that success that he will automatically be just as successful in every field, including those in which he has no relevant expertise or experience. You might call it the “g factor delusion.”
Happily, most cases are much less toxic, and merely irritate genuine experts in the field that has been intruded upon.
Apropos (from the domain of economics):
https://25iq.com/2012/12/22/charlie-munger-on-circle-of-competence-the-second-essential-filter/
* Virtually always a man. I expect it’s to do with DNA or something.
The underlying cause, yes, but not the specifics apparently. From the obituary (brackets in the original):
From there:
That reminds me of how many decades it took for people who work on the origin of flight to grasp the fact that the ability to land safely has to evolve first. (The same seems to hold for the 3 or 4 who’ve worked on the origin of jumping in frogs, but that’s not enough to do statistics with.)
Though he seems also to have been an example of a phenomenon we’ve often noted here: a very successful man* in one field, who concludes from that success that he will automatically be just as successful in every field, including those in which he has no relevant expertise or experience. You might call it the “g factor delusion.”
On the other hand, when a distinguished but elderly scientist from one specialised field starts declaring unlikely things possible in another, it’s probably time for his pills.
That reminds me of how many decades it took for people who work on the origin of flight to grasp the fact that the ability to land safely has to evolve first.
Of course the ability to land safely does exist, IOTL, in some generally-nonflying animals (perhaps most famously cats). So it could have, in principle, with the right kind of pressure, evolved first in birds too.
Many of the leading exponents of Applied Greed sincerely believe that their financial assets demonstrate that they are universal geniuses.
That reminds me of how many decades it took for people who work on the origin of flight to grasp the fact that the ability to land safely has to evolve first.
Surely the two things must happen along with each other. If the first ‘flights’ were just little hops aided by flaps of feathers, the landing would be no big deal. There would be no reason to learn how to land before you’ve learned to fly.
Also, have you ever seen a swan trying to land on a river or lake? It’s very clear that they still haven’t figured it out…
Anything that would ever want to jump off something has a reason to land better, and gliding isn’t quite flying either, even if it’s an important part of it.
But of course as far as it goes safely just means without breaking bones or worse.
I had dinner with James Watson once (that’s a story in itself, but I won’t go into it here, as it reflects badly on the organizers of a large and prestigious meeting to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Monod-Jacob-Lwoff Nobel prize) after hearing him lecture. There he made some unfortunate remarks about the inferiority of black people, but not very emphatically, and his views on this didn’t become well known until 2007, two years later. Anyway, I found him perfectly pleasant at dinner. One of the other people at the table, a Chilean friend of ours, was technically white, but with an obvious component of Aymara or Quechua genetic heritage, but Watson got on perfectly well with him.
I’ve certainly seen swans trying to land on water, and have been impressed at how badly they do it. It’s not inherent in being a bird, because other birds manage perfectly well.
Yes. The tricky part has been to come up with an evolutionary scenario that ends up creating selective pressure for flight and doesn’t contradict the fossil record. For example:
Why would that evolve?
I guess the standard tale goes something like this:
Climbing trees leads to falling. Falling leads to selective pressure for safe landing. Safe landing facilitates exploitation of falling as offensive or defensive strategy, which in turn leads to selective pressure for increased radius, precision, and timing. For species that achieved safe landing through aerodynamics, that means selective pressure on the shape, strength and agility of the body parts (and brain areas) involved.
What is lacking in the fossil record?
just little hops aided by flaps of feathers
Why would that evolve?
i think this is understood as a classic spandrel situation (praise to s.j. gould for the coinage), with feathers first appearing as some combination of insulation, decoration, threat display, and other things, and only later turning out to be useful for gliding and flight (with slowing down for safe landing as a possible early function).
addendum: i always forget co-coiner richard lewontin! sorry, richard!
and i should say “spandrel / exaptation”!